First NetHack bot ascension
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First NetHack bot ascension
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Re: First NetHack bot ascension
#2Reading through the comments, I realized that people even do speedruns in Nethack... impressive.
Re: First NetHack bot ascension
#3Reading through the comments, I realized that people even do speedruns in Nethack... impressive.
Why is it surprising? (And I do not at all mean that in a snarky tone. I've been lurking in the nethack community for so long that it seems perfectly natural to me)
Re: First NetHack bot ascension
#4Reading through the comments, I realized that people even do speedruns in Nethack... impressive.
Why is it surprising? (And I do not at all mean that in a snarky tone. I've been lurking in the nethack community for so long that it seems perfectly natural to me)
Probably because to the the person familiar enough with NetHack to have played it but never immersed themselves in the community, ascension seems hard. A speedrun is one thing, doing it on a game many can't even win is another thing entirely.
Re: First NetHack bot ascension
#5Good stuff.
There's a bot with several wins in Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, another roguelike. The combinations it has won are pretty rote, but it's still very impressive, particularly since I don't think it's even capable of knowing that much about the game (it uses Lua handles to pick up information about the state and I believe there's a fair chunk of the game that isn't exposed that way.)
Re: First NetHack bot ascension
#6Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why is it surprising? (And I do not at all mean that in a snarky tone. I've been lurking in the nethack community for so long that it seems perfectly natural to me)
Probably because to the the person familiar enough with NetHack to have played it but never immersed themselves in the community, ascension seems hard . A speedrun is one thing, doing it on a game many can't even win is another thing entirely.
I add to the point: doing it on a game many can't even make half way through.
Re: First NetHack bot ascension
#7At the risk of losing my nerd card, I've never played Nethack.
I read the reddit thread, and while it was in English, it made not a lick of sense to me. Now I know how non-engineers feel sometimes. :)
BTW, can someone tell me why this is such an amazing accomplishment? I know Nethack is very old, so is this a case of a complex problem space or just no one has tried before?
Re: First NetHack bot ascension
#8At the risk of losing my nerd card, I've never played Nethack. I read the reddit thread, and while it was in English, it made not a lick of sense to me. Now I know how non-engineers feel sometimes. :) BTW, can someone tell me why this is such an amazing accomplishment? I know Nethack is very old, so is this a case of a complex problem space or just no one has tried before?
There are a couple of things. First of all, just synchronizing the I/O is hard (there are good comments in the reddit thread there).
Combat in non-enclosed spaces is hard do to ranged attacks line-of-sight, etc.
I'm slightly surprised it has taken this long to do with pudding-farming, as that lets you get plenty of really powerful items (as well as other benefits from sacrificing the corpses)[1]. There are a few parts of the game that are super hard for a bot even with the equipment of pudding farming, but I would have thought a few thousand runs would be enough to luck through them with simpler rules.
1: Puddings are creatures which can split in two when you hit them, and each new pudding will count as a corpse (which you can sacrifice to your deity for benefits) as well as having items. I don't recall all the details, but some of the rare drops from black puddings are really powerful. The idea is you take a really crummy weapon, so you don't accidentally kill the pudding and then hit it over and over again to get lots of treasure. In this run it looks like the bot used a skeleton key as a weapon.
The main deterrent for a non-bot player doing it is that it is really boring (There's a quote somewhere from the devs that is roughly "we implemented a penalty for pudding farming, it's called 'pudding farming'" Obviously the other deterrent is the prestige of beating the game without pudding farming, and that does apply to bots too.
Re: First NetHack bot ascension
#9At the risk of losing my nerd card, I've never played Nethack. I read the reddit thread, and while it was in English, it made not a lick of sense to me. Now I know how non-engineers feel sometimes. :) BTW, can someone tell me why this is such an amazing accomplishment? I know Nethack is very old, so is this a case of a complex problem space or just no one has tried before?
Nethack is a very complex game, and takes a very long time to understand enough to ascend (beat the game). Think of it like dungeons and dragons on crack, with endless possibilities and variables.
The fact that someone wrote a bot to think on its feet enough to do this, is astonishing.
You should try it out in your free time, check out alt.org, there's a server where you can play and the irc channel #nethack on freenode (I believe) is very helpful and there's a few wikis available.
But beware, it becomes very addictive. The 'one more turn' rule applies heavily here.
Re: First NetHack bot ascension
#10Reading through the comments, I realized that people even do speedruns in Nethack... impressive.
People do blindfolded runs of Mike Tyson's Punch Out! Which is also impressive.